Thursday, 19 March 2009

Your chance to thank Monty at his farewell dinner tomorrow Friday

I will be meeting Monty on this Friday (March 20th), in fact we will celebrate the start of his new company Monty Program Ab. (For the avoidance of doubt: No, I'm not joining it, I just happen to live nearby.)

I decided Monty leaving "MySQL Ab" at least deserves to be considered some kind of a milestone. After all, MySQL is the database that propelled the web to what it is today. When you think back 10+ years, there must be many memorable moments you have experienced with MySQL.

This is what I want to do: This page will be dedicated to Monty - consider it a monument to the father of MySQL. Please use the comment form below and write something nice, personal and MySQL related. How did you first start using MySQL? Or what was your most weird and exciting experience with MySQL? What do you do with MySQL? Do you earn a living using it? Maybe you are one of those people who can write a poem in SQL?

Sadly, I can't be part of the farewell dinner / celebration of his new company. But I wrote my personal little thank you note on the page (pasted below). Perhaps you would like to, too?

Vendor lock-in

Monty,

How did I start using MySQL? I may be a special case in that I have followed your coding since the 1970s, but I think I share my reasoning to start using MySQL with a lot of people: Lack of vendor lock-in.

At my company Polycon in Finland, we were coding applications and using other databases. I think our default was Interbase, as we were coding in Delphi. We were also using Postgres for some Web apps.

Knowing your undisputable coding skills was not reason enough for me in 1997 to decide to swap our Java apps to MySQL. "The customers" may demand something else, or the functionality might be insufficient. Who knows.

You convinced me that whatever we at Polycon invested in MySQL, it wouldn't be a dead end. It would be easy to migrate away, if we later on decided to do so. We wouldn't need to make any moves that would lock us into being MySQL users.

In our case, the story ended up being the same as for many (if not most) users who start with MySQL: We never found a sufficient reason to move away.

In short: You made it easy so to move off MySQL, that you purged all barriers to *start* using MySQL. And that philosophy created the trust which was a necessary component (among many others) in building a user base of millions.